Permafrost Is an Archive
and Other Inheritances from the Alaska-Yukon Borderlands
The Yukon Ice Patch Project reveals ancient lives. A road through the boreal forest reads like a map of climate upheaval. Those houses with broken doorknobs—a legacy of government regulation over Indigenous life. Corinna Cook, who was born white on Áak’w Kwáan Tlingit land in Juneau, Alaska, wrestles with the past and future into Canada’s Yukon Territory. With writing that blends research and reverie, her essays ask how we might come into right relations with our most difficult, shared histories. How can we carry the past together, in a good way, as the land melts? The answers—elusive as they are—carry global resonance, taking shape through a deeply personal lens combined with careful study of local arts, artifacts, maps, and the land we depend on.
One: Distance Over Light or The Slower Questions
The Black Spruce
Distance over Light
Sister Essays: The Young and the Old
The Young
The Old
Swan Signs
Two: Government Documents: A Lineage of Blades or The Story of the Day
Atlin
Permafrost Is an Archive
YFN 101: What We Give to One Another
Chooutla: Truth and Reconciliation
Government Documents: A Lineage of Blades
Three: The Kohklux Map or The Trails are Always There
Under the Bridge at Johnson’s Crossing
The Kohklux Map
The Ash and the Literature
A Triangle of Sun
Salsa
The End
Acknowledgments
“This volume is a spiritual cartography, a deep map of aching, of longing. Cook’s essays chart our small human awareness as one part of geologic time, taking in spiritual, scientific, and metaphysical ways of knowing. She draws from archives and from culture-bearers. Her finely crafted essays become forms of reconciliation storytelling. Cook asserts that a shared future requires everyone to enter into right relationships with divisive histories, and then to pitch in to help carry the difficult past (and present).”
